Tuesday, June 19, 2018

You have read it here before, on several occasions. The Trump-Kim
negotiation for North Korean denuclearization was orchestrated by Chinese
president Xi Jinping. The reason was simple. Trump and Xi made a deal. In
exchange for Xi’s help—which Trump praised lavishly—Trump would do Xi a favor
in return.

When Xi asked Trump to help save Chinese telecom giant, ZTE, Trump
graciously acceded to the request. It
was a simple quid pro quo, the kind the forges relationships between governments
and between people.

American
diplomacy achieved a landmark result in Trump’s Singapore summit with Kim
Jong-un, offering the repugnant North Korean leader legitimacy and the prospect
of regime continuity in return for his nuclear weapons program.

The
president’s “Art of the Deal” negotiating style had less to do with the
constructive outcome than old-fashioned diplomacy under the skillful guidance
of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo: Consultation with allies, back-channel
exchanges with the other side, and a proposal that both sides could live with.
Asia Times published on June 10 former South Korean Foreign Minister Yoon
Young-Kwan’s guide to getting a “yes” from Pyongyang, and a Pompeo
adviser told me that South Korean insights were incorporated into the American
initiative.

The
Korean deal also entailed some quiet trade-offs with China. Importantly,
President Trump intervened personally to rescind the Commerce Department’s
late-April ban on American chip sales to China’s second-largest telecom
equipment company ZTE, in retaliation for ZTE’s violation of sanctions against
Iran and North Korea. ZTE’s mobile handsets use Qualcomm chips, and a ban on
chip sales would shut the company down.

What was the ZTE deal?

On the
president’s initiative, the Commerce Department instead negotiated a
$1.9-billion fine, changes in ZTE management, and the imposition of American
compliance controls on the company’s operations. That was a severe penalty and
an unprecedented assertion of American control over the operations of a Chinese
company, but a deal that both sides could live with.

It sounded reasonable. Administration figures, like Peter
Navarro, have explained the deal explicitly. Yet, key senators, led by Marco
Rubio have been trying to sabotage it:

Now the
US Senate has sought to sabotage Trump’s ZTE deal, by embedding a ban on US
chip sales to ZTE in the national defense authorization act – despite intensive
lobbying by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and other administration officials.

Perhaps it made sense to call him little Marco.

Spengler explains that the Rubio foreign policy theory holds
that America should promote democracy and overthrow authoritarian leaders. It
is positively Wilsonian in its thrust. It was promoted by George W. Bush and
Barack Obama.

Rubio
remains a utopian who thinks that the object of US foreign policy is to bring
down authoritarian regimes and to replace them with democracies.

Worse yet, some Trump advisers, Spengler explains, believed
that shutting down ZTE would destabilize the Xi Jinping regime. They are making
a large mistake:

Some of
Trump’s advisers believe that shutting down ZTE would destabilize the Zi
Xinping regime. “I want to shut ZTE down so that 75,000 unemployed engineers
demonstrate against the government in Bejing,” a former administration official
told me. The usual suspects among the neo-conservative punditeska, for example the perennial
predictor of China’s collapse Gordon Chang,
accuse Trump of crumbling before Chinese demands.

Yes indeed, Gordon Chang has been predicting the collapse of
China for at least two decades now. The fact that he has been consistently
wrong has not prevented him from becoming a great authority on China and
Asia.

Do we really believe, Spengler suggests, that American
democracy will cure all of the world’s ills:

The
complaint among the foreign policy elite that Trump is crude and
unsophisticated has a perverse element of truth: It takes enormous intellectual
sophistication to convince one’s self that American democracy is a universal
panacea for the world’s political problems and the inevitable goal of human
progress. The foreign policy establishment is not stupid, but only psychotic.

As of now, the Senate has passed the appropriation bill with
the attack on ZTE. The House appropriation bill does not contain it. If it goes
through, the reaction will not necessarily be in our best interest:

If the
Senate passes the defense appropriation bill with the ZTE bomb, and Trump is
unable to excise it by presidential veto or other means, Beijing will draw the
conclusion that the president no longer is in control of US foreign policy.
Instead, it will confront an adversary that does not want to achieve this or
that particular policy objective, but rather wants to undermine the regime. Its
first response will be to mobilize national resources to achieve independence
in semiconductor production as quickly as possible, replacing its $220 billion
a year in chip imports with domestic substitutes.

And also:

Rather
than a tariff war, the world will face a disruption of the global supply chain,
major dislocations in high-technology trade, shocks to pricing, and a return to
national autarky in a number of economic policies. The result will be ugly in
economic terms, and it will raise strategic tensions everywhere in the world.
Hard to imagine an American policy initiative stupider than its attempt to
export democracy to Iraq, this will go down as the dumbest thing America ever
did.

One cannot help but agree that the Rubio rider is among the
dumbest things America ever did. Its attempt to undermine the president’s
ability to conduct foreign policy and to undermine his successful summit with
North Korea speaks ill of little Marco.

1 comment:

Is Marco angling for a quid pro quo? My Magic 8-Ball says "Signs Point To Yes".I do not have a smartphone, and don't want one. I see a ZTE chip as similar to Amazon's Alexa: It would be one's own personal Stasi agent on one's own payroll. You can call me paranoid, but I say I'm just "more aware".